And so, when they talked about turning him out, it almost drove him beside himself. In his dismay, he ran like a child to his friend, the butler at Melton Park. It so happened that while he was relating his troubles Earl Fitzwilliam appeared on the scene, and Clare in his excitement poured them all out to him. The Earl listened with much sympathy; and, anxious to relieve his anxiety, told him that he would find a cottage and a small piece of land for him. Lord Fitzwilliam was better than his word, for not only did he have a cottage built expressly for Clare, but he took pains to have it erected in the most charming spot in his domain. Half-hidden in mossy orchard- trees and surrounded by a luxuriant and fragrant garden, a cottage in Northborough would appear just the home for a Rural Poet. But Clare was something more than a mere reflector of external nature. He would have been as great a poet, and perhaps a greater, had he been born amongst bricks and mortar. Deep, intense human affection lay at the basis of his being, and almost overpowered every other faculty. From earliest infancy it had gone out to all things animate and inanimate about him, and so entwined itself about them as to make them part of its own being. Sordid and ugly they might be to others, but to him they were all aglow with the radiance of his own love.
"O native endearments! I would not forsake ye,
I would not forsake ye for sweetest of scenes:
For sweetest of gardens that Nature could make me,
I would not forsake ye, dear valleys and greens.
Swamps of wild rush-beds and sloughs' squashy traces,
Grounds of rough fallows with thistle and weed,
Flats and low valleys of kingcups and daisies,
Sweetest of subjects are ye for my reed:
Ye commons, left free in the rude rays of Nature,
Ye brown heaths, beclothed in furze as ye be.
My wild eye in rapture adores every feature.
Ye are dear as this heart in my bosom to me."
When the time therefore came for him to go, the wrench was more than he could bear. He dallied and delayed until his wife could bear it no longer, and at last, by the advice of some of his best friends, she determined to make the move without his consent. When he saw the goods actually being carried out of the house, he rose up and followed them as a man might the corpse of one
